The dynamic range of the elected government body is extremely low. As long as there are a significant proportion of people in office who deny the reality of climate change, it is unlikely that meaningful discussion of solutions will occur.
In response to a sister comment, realistically, to address climate change, we would need to:
- build roughly 300 GWh of grid storage worldwide, lithium iron phosphate seems a leading contender although sodium-[sulfur|nickel] has the obvious abundance advantage
- replace gas heating systems with heat pumps and district (waste) heating
- implement carbon capture at all steel/concrete production plants (or less likely use low-carbon processes)
- replace fueled vehicle use (most of which is personal cars) with electric
- build some amount of non-polluting power stations, I'm not sure what exactly but by now it's the easiest part
- I'm not sure exactly but maybe you can replace torch manufacturing with electric arcs and lasers or something?
- also some carbon capture unfortunately probably the crushed olivine thing I'd guess
Someone's probably made a projection for the cost of this but it's useless with any shift of this magnitude.
The best ones I've seen so far involve massive engineering projects in orbit to let us control the amount of sunlight hitting the earth.
Those are technologically feasible, theoretically workable, and at least somewhat reversible.
However, they don't really take human nature into account. Megasatellites for solar gain control would be an intensely scarce, valuable resource, and a de facto superweapon - "agree to our terms or you'll never have good crop growing sunlight again."
Nobody would be willing to cede or share control of such a system to someone else. Wars would break out quickly, and no deployed system would go undestroyed for long.
The other plans I've seen seem problematic to me either morally ("first world gets to keep its tech but you guys who are bootstrapping with carbon can go DIAF"), technologically ("We think there will turn out to be some way to capture carbon super-efficiently that we haven't found yet"), or reversibility ("whoops, we put too much dust in the atmosphere - guess we're starving three billion people for the next year or four, folks").
I'm not saying there is no possible solution - just that I haven't seen a realistic one myself.
That's what I was referring to when I referenced hurting third-world economies badly.
My understanding is that a lot of developing regions are using their carbon stores to improve quality of life and lifespan for their inhabitants - bad as coal may be for your lungs, it's not as bad as having no reliable energy for things like sewers.
Hence my comment saying "...if you're bootstrapping with carbon you can go DIAF."